Drilling for the purpose of teaching the correct pronunciation of foreign languages has heretofore been carried out by having a native speaker of a foreign language evaluate the pronunciation of the student, or by a self-training method using cassette tapes, video tapes or disk records that are commercially marketed.
A native speaker of a foreign language who evaluates the student's pronunciation will find it very difficult to have the student perceive subtle differences in pronunciation. Using cassette tapes and video tapes, on the other hand, the student has no means for ensuring that his pronunciation is correct, i.e., the student must evaluate his pronunciation by relying upon his own sense of hearing.
The present applicant, therefore, has previously proposed an apparatus for teaching correct pronunciation such as stress, accent, intonation, vowels and consonants (see Japanese Patent Application No. 303772/1986) by analyzing the voicing that accompanies the student's pronunciation, displaying voice parameters such as waveforms, power, pitch (high and low of sound) and sound spectrograph obtained as a result of analysis, comparing the pronunciation data measured from the pattern of voice parameters with the model pronunciation data, and offering correction commentary based on the result of the comparison, so that the student may efficiently acquire the standard voice pattern of the teacher.